This afternoon, I finished the book that inspired the film, Unbroken. I am amazed by how incredibly close the movie stays to Laura Hillenbrand's biography about Olympic athlete, WWII bombardier, plane crash survivor, and POW Louis Zamperini.
Yet there's a story in the book that the movie just briefly covers. That of Zamperini's life after. After the plane crash. After 47 days lost at sea. After being imprisoned in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp. After enduring years of abuse and starvation. After.
Zamperini looked the same on the outside. But all that he had lived through had left him a fraction of the man he had been. He was alive. He had survived. More than once by some miracle.
But he was a broken man.
And it didn't take long for him to realize this.
When he returned home, his family - who had been told that he was assumed dead - were elated. They stared at their son, at their brother with almost disbelieving eyes. All along, they had hoped that their highest hopes were not false. That somewhere in this world their Louis was living. His heart still beating, still racing to come home to them. God answered their prayers.
A few months being back, back in a place where he never quite knew he would return to, but never lost hope to see again, Louis met a girl named Cynthia Applewhite. He would always say that from the minute he first saw her, he knew that he had to marry her. And he did. About three months later.
Yet though thousands and thousands of miles away from his prison, his past, Zamperini was unable to let it go. Night after night, flashbacks terrorized him. He wrestled with the darkness, but it always won. Never was he able to go to sleep without being haunted by his life as a prisoner.
To cope, he regularly drank himself to sleep to avoid another confrontation with his nightly appointment with the demons. But his drinking spilled over into this daily life, turning him into a monster.
Every night, he wrestled with his unforgiveness towards "the Bird" - the sadistic guard that robbed him of his identity and his dignity, his belief in humanity, his levity, his passion for living. He envisioned himself strangling the Bird's neck, choking him until he gasped his final breath. Zamperini secretly began plotting to return to Japan one day - to murder this man who had robbed him of everything he had hoped to become. Of his dreams to be an Olympic medalist, a good husband, a functioning human being.
His hate and rage consumed him. He wouldn't stop until he could have his vengeance.
Meanwhile, "the Bird," his real name Mutsuhiro Watanabe, evaded authority to avoid being tried as a war criminal. He lived with strangers, doing odd jobs in exchange for board, concealing his identity from everyone. Hunted by the police, he could have no contact with his family, who were being watched and monitored at all hours. Somehow, he managed to visit them to let them know he was still alive.
While there, detectives arrived at the family's doors. They were there to search for Watanabe, who hid in a closet as they looked for him. They didn't check it and he wasn't found. He promised his family that he would return again in exactly two years. Rumors soon began to circulate that he had committed suicide. He went off the radar. For a while.
Stateside, Louis continued to spiral downward. He was disoriented and drunk most of the time, abusive and wrathful, bitter toward God. As Hillenbrand writes,
“The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer. In seeking the Bird’s death to free himself, Louis had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant. During the war, the Bird had been unwilling to let go of Louie; after the war, Louie was unable to let go of the Bird.”
Louie and Cynthia had a little girl, but even the baby was not enough to quell the darkness in his heart, from the revenge and the alcoholism. Cynthia separated from him, deciding that divorce was the only answer to escape this nightmare she had unknowingly walked into when she said "I do."
As they were apart, Cynthia heard of Billy Graham's tent crusades in Los Angeles. She begged Louis to go with her. They had tried everything else. He refused. But when she came back one night and told him that she no longer wanted to go through with the divorce, he started to reconsider his hesitancy to hear what this preacher from North Carolina had to say. He went.
And he heard Billy Graham passionately encourage the audience to let God rescue them. Louis heard these words: "Here tonight, there's a drowning man, a drowning woman, a drowning boy, a drowning girl that is out lost in the sea of life." Those words resonated with him.
But Louie's heart wasn't ready to let it all go. He grabbed Cynthia's hand and rushed out of the tent.
Again, his wife pleaded, begging him to go back for another night during Graham's crusades. Annoyed by her persistence, he agreed to go one more time.
This time, he heard the Reverend Billy Graham say something that finally got his attention and reminded him of who he had been:
"If you look into the heavens tonight, on this beautiful California night, I see the stars and can see the footprints of God...I think to myself, my Father, my Heavenly Father, hung them there with a flaming fingertip and holds there them with the power of His omnipotent hand, and He runs the whole universe, and He's not too busy running the whole universe to count the hairs on my head and see a sparrow when it falls, because God is interested in me."
Right then, Zamperini remembered his promise to God. Out on a life boat, ironically his life slipping away, Louis had prayed to God. Though never very religious, in that moment, surrounded by the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, he had time to contemplate God. Undistracted from anything else, he saw the sun rise and set each day, the stars start shining above him each night. Could it be that God was looking down on him from above? That even though no one else knew where he was, God did? The same God who created him and was now the only one who could save him. Louis prayed from that yellow raft, promising God that he would serve Him all the days of his life is He saved his life. If you will save me, he had prayed, I will serve You forever.
Fast forward more than six years and Zamperini remembers that promise he had made. Here he was - alive! God hadn't allowed the ocean or the war or the Bird to take his life. Here he was - still breathing! God had saved his life, but he had not yet let God save his soul. That night, he surrendered and vowed to live the rest of his life serving Him. He committed his life to Jesus.
That night, he came home, he felt like a different man. And that night, there was no nightmare. The first peaceful night since he returned home.
Since he gave his life to Jesus that September day in 1949, Zamperini never had another nightmare for the rest of his life. Not one.
Jesus had freed Louie from the brokenness that had threatened to make him a man that he didn't want to be - a man of rage and violence, of hate and resentment. Through Jesus Christ, he became unbroken, always crediting his strength and his joy in life to his faith in God.
After that night, Zamperini went on to live a life of greatness - using his story not as an excuse to be broken, but as evidence of God's unfailing love for him and His faithfulness. Unshackled from the past, he went on to open the non-profit Victory Boys Camp. He shared his faith with the boys, encouraging them to overcome their challenges and become the men they could be.
He also traveled around the nation, telling his story in elementary school classrooms, stadiums, ships, churches.
Zamperini received numerous awards and honors for his service. Before five different Games, he was chosen to carry the Olympic torch.
In his seventies, he learned how to skateboard and in his nineties, he still enjoyed skiing down mountains. This was and is Louis Zamperini - embracing all of life to the fullest.
Toward the later years of his life, he found out the Watanabe was still alive. Through CBS, who had interviewed the Bird, Zamperini tried to make contact. Watanabe first agreed to see Louie, but later backed out of the deal. Louie sent him a letter telling him that he did forgive him and hoped that he would become a Christian.
Louie never heard back from Watanabe, who died in 2003.
Louis Zamperini's story amazes me. His strength and perseverance are truly remarkable and indescribable. What he endured and how he survived is absolutely astounding.
Yet what captures my attention the most about his life story is that God reached out to him and told him to forgive. And through forgiving Watanabe, God extended his forgiveness to him. As Jesus taught, when we do not forgive others, God will not forgive us. And because of his decision to forgive and thus receive God's forgiveness, the rest of his life story was redeemed. And he became a man - though faced with so much brokenness - who lived unbroken.
Without that decision to surrender, to let go of the rage, to trust God to do something inside his heart, to believe that something good could result from what he had experienced - without all of this - I know there would be no book to read, to movie to see, no story to tell.
And what a loss that would have been.
Thank you, Louis Zamperini, for choosing a different ending. For letting God change your heart so that His story that He wrote with your life can continue to inspire many. To live a life worth remembering and sharing.
"The one who forgives never brings up the past to that person's face. When you forgive, it's like it never happened. True forgiveness is complete and total."
-Louis Zamperini
This blog post is dedicated to Louis Zamperini's life and legacy.